Remember that no matter how many points of familiarity with modern life we might find in medieval societies, they were societies that functioned in fundamentally different ways than modern democracies.

Even to begin to understand the vast gulf of difference, you need to think about ideology, or the comprehensive system of values and beliefs that formed the context in which people lived. Medieval societies were hierarchical, and absolutely so in the early centuries of the period but still strongly so right up to the Enlightenment.

In a society where aristocrats comprised five percent of the population, the rest of the people were commoners. And commoners were “lorded” over by their betters. Abuse of power was ubiquitous, most people were basically trapped in roles that they were born into, and ideas about the supposed superiority and inferiority of people based on their station dominated most people’s understanding of why the world was ordered the way it was ordered. Even many peasant revolts were merely trying to ease the conditions of onerous servitude, not to topple the existing hierarchy. Servitude would be most people’s fate, and they knew it.

To sample how awful such an authoritarian society could be, you can read Thomas Asbridge’s The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones. This book, although not without its detractors (see the interesting dustup in the Goodreads comments where some medieval historians attack Asbridge’s work), offers a fascinating portrait of William Marshal’s ascent from a landless younger son of a noble to a famous knight and earl. The book is packed with useful information about the training of knights and about court politics, but the stories about the harm inflicted by monarchs and nobles operating without the restraints imposed by modern legal systems are routinely horrible.

In contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, you have to read a book like Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed to fully grasp how many ideas needed to change for freedom, or liberty, to exist for larger numbers of people.

Wood’s contention is that most people overlook the radical and transformative effects of such ideas as ordinary people have the right to focus on their own prosperity and people are allowed to pursue personal happiness. The great mass of the people took the revolution further even than the leaders imagined going. Knowing that a young George Washington “called ordinary farmers ‘the grazing multitude,’” for example, might help Americans begin to understand the negative ways in which living in an aristocratic system shapes your thinking.

Imagine how difficult the task, how brave the people, when millions of ordinary men and women started to think thoughts like “You are no better than me” or “I should earn a living wage for my hard work” or “My children should chart their own course.”